Everybody Dies

Patient #10 - Female, 52 Years
Diagnosis: renal insufficiency secondary to sepsis, chronic gastroenteritis, hydroelectric disequilibrium, moderate anemia

As I was waiting for the interns to finish their morning paperwork (there’s a flurry of activity as they rush to finish the clinical evolutions from the past day and distribute all of the charts and relevant materials to the beds), I was wandering around the ward looking at the patients and trying to figure out how to occupy my time. I glanced at the woman in bed #10, and I saw her on her back with her mouth open, not really moving. I thought to myself "Hmmmm, she doesn’t look so good, in fact she sort of looks dead...no, it can’t be, they’re keeping an eye on her." And I continued on my merry way.

10 minutes later I came back to the ward, and the woman was on the floor surrounded by several doctors and nurses. Her mouth was still wide open, exposing all of her teeth, as the doctors took turns trying to resuscitate her by pumping her chest. There was no machine keeping track of her heart, there was no defibrillator, and there wasn’t an oxygen mask ready at hand. Everything seemed rather haphazard. They spent more than 15 minutes trying to bring her back when I was standing there thinking "She’s dead, I saw her like that more than 20 minutes ago. " There were a lot of thoughts rushing through my head, but I couldn't help but wonder if I could have prevented her death if I had said something earlier? Is it even my job to be keeping track of that, and shouldn’t someone have been keeping a closer eye on her?

As I was standing there watching them pump her chest, her limp body moving back and forth, they asked me to help... my immediate, panicked reply was ¨I can’t, I don’t know how.¨ While it was partly true, I think I was also afraid to get close to a dead body. All of my experiences thus far have involved some degree of separation from sickness and death, and that was so real and so accessible. After I said that I was mad at myself for turning down the first opportunity to help someone hands-on. Why did I do that?

When they realized they couldn’t bring her back, they wrapped her up in a sheet, leaving half of her face with its wide eyes and open mouth still showing, and they left her lying on the floor for another 20 minutes while they went to look for a dolly to take her away. They finally wheeled one out of the back, placed her on it, and then left it in the corridor outside of the interns´ room while they called the family and cleaned up her bed. The poor girl who was sharing her habitation was sitting in a chair next to the desk, hugging a raggedy stuffed animal. I asked her if she was okay, and she said yes...and explained how one moment the woman was breathing, and then she just stopped.

I’m surprised that I’m not more disturbed by this. Even though this is the first time I have ever seen a dead person, more than horrified, I was fascinated by the process of trying to bring her back. The only explanation I can find for how I feel is that I didn’t see her dying, and that she seemed so dead to me during the whole ordeal that I could file it away nicely in my brain as something that had ceased to be human.